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Thursday, September 6, 2012

Dealing With Twitter



I was on Twitter the other day, and I still don't get it.

Facebook makes sense. Even Timeline makes sense. But Twitter? No.

I joined Twitter in July 2009 when it was about 3 years old, the same age Justin Bieber started dating Selena Gomez.

My first impressions of Twitter were actually pretty good. I liked its simplicity. I liked how you could follow people without having to send friend requests like a loser.

Who wants to be friends with Bill Gates?

Back then Facebook was the harbinger of spam requests, so Twitter was a refreshing alternative...if you could understand what the hell was going on.

Let's take a look.

1. Logging in.
First of all there was the time it took just to get to the login page. Even these days it takes ages. I can run around our block before I'm logged in. This is unacceptable.

2. Trying hard to be hip.
After I was logged in, I didn't understand the whole "@" and "#" nonsense.

People were saying stuff like:

Where did @myfriends go? #ForeverAlone

Go ahead. Say it out loud. It sounds like "where did at my friends go? Forever Alone" which is grammatically incorrect and doesn't make sense.

I was so eager to learn more about Twitter that I even went on Wikipedia.

I like to call this Twitipedia.

Apparently "@" is used to direct a message (known as a "tweet") at someone and "#" is used to categorise the tweet into a topic.

3. Conversation.
So what happens when someone tweets at you? How do you comment on it?

It turns out that you don't. You have to tweet them back with a separate message using silly "@" and "#", making it hard to track a conversation. You couldn't see what was already said easily.

On Facebook, comments are listed directly under each other, similar to chat programs like MSN Messenger or Skype. It's clean and easy to follow. Most of all, it makes sense.

Rome-ing the internet.

Twitter is like discovering SMS all over again.

It totally turned me off, just like when you discover that a pretty girl smokes.

With newer versions of Twitter, it's easier to follow a conversation, but I wonder why they didn't add that feature the first place. This is madness.

4. Followers.
Facebook introduced "friends" which makes some sense. But followers?

It's not like you're Jesus of Nazareth or Neo from The Matrix. Twitter might as well call them "disciples" while they're at it.



5. Retweets.
Retweeting is basically copy and pasting what someone else said and showing it to your followers. Where's your Vancouver referencing?

6. Photos.
Facebook has its own photo viewer built into the website. Twitter doesn't.

Twitter has to use separate websites for people to post pictures on, which lowers the pressure on servers. Even so, pictures still take ages to load and sometimes they don't even load at all.

Imagine this, but on Twitter.

7. Mobile Twitter.
If you've ever used Twitter on your phone, it's like Inception. It's impossible to navigate.

You don't know how you got to that page. You can't even update tweets. It's as if you're stuck in time itself.


You need to wake up.

You need the kick.

Twitter needs a kick.

Maybe a punch too.







Tell me about your experiences with Twitter! Would you recommend it to your friends?


2 comments:

  1. Ahh I finally understand what those stupid hashtags and @'s mean. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete